Windows 11: Same or Worse?

I've been doing what limited testing I can in a virtual machine environment, but so far Windows 11 seems to be causing far less symptoms than Windows 10. It's still the same awful Win 10 user interface, but it is causing almost no symptoms, eye strain, or migraine when looking at it.

Oddly enough, when you disable the visual performance settings in Windows 11, the display actually seems worse, where in Windows 10 that helped. That would lend some credence to my dwm.exe theory since those settings are all directly routed through the dwm.exe

I took a snapshot of the dwm executable in Windows 10 and Windows 11 and it is certainly different, almost 20% larger and a build date of 6 months later. And it makes sense since Windows 11 has many more visual effects and they all would be controlled by dwm.exe

Windows 10 DWM.exe

Windows 11 DWM.exe

I should mention that the version of Windows 11 I am running, while advertised as the latest Insider Preview build, does not seem to be using a lot of the new graphic interface features besides the start menu. For example my Settings menu look exactly like Windows 10 not like the new one all the screenshots say Windows 1 should have.

Quad43

Microsoft released a new developer preview 2 days ago that I downloaded, and it's even better for my eyes than the earlier preview release. On a scale of 1-10, 1 being perfect Windows 7 classic mode with zero strain, and 10 being Windows 10 which triggers me in an instant, out of the box on default settings with no customization options set, Windows 11 seems to be around an 2-3. And I am doing side by side comparisons in identical virtual machines on the same host, to eliminate variables between the 2 OS's

I am definitely hopeful for the OS if this trend holds/continues. IT's a big difference, and it would lean towards my dwm.exe being the cause of our issue theory (for Windows at least)

Quad43

I would recommend installing it on a Virtual machine. VM's are the greatest thing since sliced bread. VirtualBox is free software, the ISO is freely downloadable, so there's no cost to try it.

I've been doing testing with .65 and so far it is noticeably better than Windows 10

It does require a WDDM 2.0 and up graphics driver, so that means a lot of older GPUs are out.

I have a positively ANCIENT video card (and a similarly ancient motherboard without TPM or SecureBoot) and 11 installs and runs fine in a VM. You don't need to invest in any new hardware to try it out.

Sunspark

Eventually, yes you are correct, but if it's bad on a VM, it's almost certainly going to be bad on bare metal. If it's good on a VM, thats an encouraging start and then the next step would be a bare metal test. But not everyone has a spare PC laying around or the know how/desire to start partitioning things.

Sunspark VM just uses the VM's driver which in turn is running inside another driver, perhaps on W7

If I run Windows 10 in a VM on my known good Win7 host, I get migraines. A host being good does not neccesarily mean the guest will be artificially good either.

And not for nothing, but if someone found that a Win7 host running a Windows 11 VM worked for them, they could just do that forever. If I ever get to the point where my hardware dies and I can't get Windows 7 to run on the hardware of the day, my plan is to install Linux on my PC, install VirtualBox, and run a Virtual Win 7 instance as my primary PC.

Runing Win11 in a VM also bypasses the TPM/SecureBoot nonsense and makes it an option for anyone who doesn't have supported hardware and isn't comfortable doing a wim swap or DISM install

So I tried Windows 11 (the latest build as of writing, .100). I thought since it's technically Windows 10 21H2, which I tried the preview build before and wasn't impressed, that this would basically be the same but with the Windows 11 branding.

But I was wrong. They actually completely changed the rendering compared to earlier versions of 21H2, presumably when they plopped in the new UI.

Not yet saying if it's better or worse. That will take quite a bit of testing on different setups. But since I feel that the rendering is very different, it will have to be better or worse. I don't think it will be the same, whatever the outcome.

I would also recommend to spend a good amount of time just browsing the Windows interface during your testing. The browsers are adding extra layers of dithering / strain which confuse the issue.

Windows 11 is not agreeing with me. Familiar feeling of tension around my eyes which I know will progress to nasty muscle pain and headache if I persist through it. An odd feeling like what I’m looking at is not entirely flat, and as if I were looking at the text from a slightly diagonal angle. Hard to describe. Eyes readjusting frequently and effortfully to maintain focus.

For me it’s not the solution.

Now and again MS comes and fiddles around the edges with the rendering, but the core is fundamentally broken since 1607. At this point, with HDR, complex display driver models (always with more being added), and the desire to have ever more eye popping and higher bit colour, and visual effects. I don’t see how they backpedal on that. I am getting really pessimistic on the software angle of eyestrain.

The highly processed and flickery image is a feature, not a bug. Why would they fix it? it’s not broken, not even secretly, to them. I think what happened is I was wrong about the rendering. It didn’t change that much. What happened is that there is finally a UI which can take advantage of all the groundwork 1607 lay years ago, and so being designed for that technology it is less jarringly bad, especially as the new fonts they are using are more robust and stand up to their rendering better, but under the hood I think it’s pretty similar. Using it on a larger, modest PPI screen as compared to my small high PPI laptop really highlights that some of the same visual artifacts which have been present since 1607; like flickery squirmy text (especially where it is more thin) which defies focus, is STILL present all these years later.

Windows 10 2015 LTSB is (barely) passable for me, but to see how far things have changed for the negative, you have to go back to Windows XP. Now that is real stillness and flatness in an image and true relaxation for the eyes and brain. It blows Windows 7 out of the water for comfort, even though many of us would call that a safe OS. For sure XP isn’t the answer (unless you keep it offline), but the progression over time is illustrative.